Achievement is limited only by imagination, and beamline numbers
The research repertoire of ANSTO’S Australian Synchrotron – the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering’s sister facility in Melbourne – is to get a boost with the construction of three new instruments, complementing ANSTO’S already-comprehensive swag of technology.
The additions will be the MicroComputed Tomography (MCT), Medium Energy X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (MEX) and Biological Small Angle X-ray Scattering (BIOSAXS) beamlines. Expected to be operational in the next three to four years, they will bring the total number of beamlines at the Synchrotron to 13.
“Ever since we opened the doors in 2007 we’ve been looking at more instruments,” says the Director of the Australian Synchrotron, Andrew Peele.
The MCT is like a super high-resolution 3-D CT scan, which can “virtually slice and dice” a sample quickly, Peele says: “We’ll get full 3-D data sets in about a minute.”
Using these scans, researchers will be able to understand the inner workings of healthy and diseased tissues, or new energy materials such as batteries.
The MEX can help in the health realm – to develop cancer treatments, for instance – by mapping lighter elements such as sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine, calcium and potassium.
The BIOSAXS will also help drug design by studying proteins in detail. “This is the result of a fabulous success story,” Peele says. The Synchrotron’s existing SAXS instrument was earmarked for use by materials scientists but it turned out it took “pretty great images of protein envelope shapes” Demand for it skyrocketed, so it was decided to build the biology-dedicated BIOSAXS beamline.
Peele has no doubt the new beamlines will expand the Synchrotron’s contributions to research, “which has already been proved in spades”.
“What we can achieve is limited only by our imagination and the number of beamlines.”